Items tagged with Hack

AOL has experienced a nasty security breach that exposed a great deal of user information, and the company says that it was the work of criminal hackers, as opposed to some kind of glitch or oversight. “AOL is investigating a security incident that involved unauthorized access to AOL's network and systems. AOL is working with best-in-class external forensic experts and federal authorities to investigate this serious criminal activity,” wrote the AOL Mail Team in a blog post. AOL first noticed that there was a problem when users began seeing an increase in spam in the form of spoofed...Read more...

Facebook has endeavored to make coding a more efficient process by developing a coding language called Hack. Facebook has been using Hack internally for quite some time, and now the company is open sourcing the tool for anyone to use. “Hack is a programming language for HHVM that interoperates seamlessly with PHP,” reads the “Hack Lang” website. “Hack reconciles the fast development cycle of PHP with the discipline provided by static typing, while adding many features commonly found in other modern programming languages.” The problem that Facebook addressed with...Read more...

The good news for Target and its customers is that the retailer’s robust IT system detected the massive holiday season hack that affected tens of millions of accounts before it ever happened. The bad news is that Target failed to act on that detection, and the rest is history. According to Bloomberg, Target’s security tools detected the malware used in the hack as early as November 30th, and the thieves weren’t able to remove any data until December 2nd, which means that there were a couple of days wherein the threat couild have been mitigated. Bloomberg asserts that it was human...Read more...

This weekend, Dropbox experienced an outage that lasted far too long. A wing of hacker collective Anonymous claimed credit for the outage, saying it performed a database hack, which turned out to be a hoax. However, the group maintained that it did hit Dropbox with a DDoS attack, which was timed to coincide with the site’s scheduled maintenance. Dropbox has strongly denied the hack, but it hasn’t said anything about the claim of a DDoS attack, which seems odd. The company has talked around it by carefully describing the post-mortem. “On Friday at 5:30 PM PT, we had a planned maintenance...Read more...

For a moment there, it appeared as though popular cloud storage service Dropbox had been hacked, with the user database accessed and user emails being exposed. Two loosely affiliated wings of hacker collective Anonymous, AnonOpsKorea and The 1775 Sec, claimed credit, but the whole thing was just a hoax timed to coincide with scheduled Dropbox site maintenance. Credit: TechCrunch The two groups both claimed that they compromised the Dropbox website Friday evening and accessed the site’s database, but shortly thereafter Wesley McGrew of McGrew Security noted in a tweet that the emails in the...Read more...

When the hackers roll to Vegas, you know a good amount of exploits are going to surface. Defcon was on point this week in the Nevada desert, and here's yet another exploit that has piqued our interest. Researchers have discovered that the Windows 8 Secure Boot mechanism can be circumvented on PCs built by certain manufacturers. Why? Oversights in how those particular vendors implemented the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification. Andrew Furtak, Oleksandr Bazhaniuk and Yuriy Bulygin were on hand to showcase their findings. Thankfully, due to the nature of the event, none of the...Read more...

The Internet is an amazing place. But, increasingly, it's a place filled with peril and pitfalls, particularly if you're hosting something of value. International cybercrime has found itself in the spotlight of late, and now Microsoft is making a concerted effort to help curb it. Microsoft has just announced that it is working lockstep with leaders in the financial services industry, including the Financial Services – Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), NACHA – The Electronic Payments Association, the American Bankers Association (ABA) – Agari, and other technology...Read more...

There sure has been a lot of hacking going on in recent weeks. Even major news outlets like The New York Times have joined the U.S. government in suspecting the Chinese military of attempting to solicit digital information, and this week, Facebook announced that it too has been the target of an attack. In a post erected to the company's Security portal, it confessed that while it invests heavily in protecting users and proactively preventing such attacks, one managed to slip by last month. In Jan. 2013, Facebook Security noticed that its systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack. Reportedly,...Read more...

Concerned that hacking is on the rise? You've every right to be worried. Following recent reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times surrounding intrusion from outside forces into their news systems and e-mail databases, Twitter has now affirmed a security puncture of its own. The company released a blog post noting that it "detected unusual access patterns that led to us identifying unauthorized access attempts to Twitter user data." In that discovery process, Twitter found one live attack and neutralized it, but some damage was already done. The investigation has thus far indicated...Read more...

Where there are systems for financial transactions, there will always be opportunities to skirt those systems, and that holds true for NFC transactions, too. Researchers have already demonstrated a hack for Android NFC that lets them refill fare card balances for transit systems, including subways, in two states. The key to the hack is UltraReset, which was developed by researchers Corey Benninger and Max Sobell at Intrepidus Group. The researchers used the app to successfully refill balances on fare cards in New Jersey and San Francisco, using the app on Android phones that have NFC...Read more...

As we reported on Tuesday, GoDaddy suffered a major outage that left thousands, and potentially millions of customers with downed websites and services. While a supposed member of the Anonymous collective took credit for an attack, GoDaddy has since concluded that no hack or distributed denial of service attack took place. Instead, the company has posted on its site that the cause of the issue was a router that somehow had its data tables corrupted. Many have remained skeptical about this claim, however, as for a single router being able to take out all of GoDaddy seems unlikely. All hosts have,...Read more...

Did you know that it's now possible to run Android 4.0 on your Nokia N9? It's true. While the N9 and the Lumia 800 use the same amazing Nokia hardware, neither of those runs Android. Nokia made a decision long ago to use MeeGo on their last great in-house smartphone (the N9), while shifting to Windows Phone shortly after on the Lumia 800. But what if you want Nokia hardware with Google software? Tough luck, right? Wrong. There's now a way to dual-boot your N9, with Android 4.0 being the secondary operating system. The procedure is complex, yes, but not impossible. And thankfully for you, there's...Read more...

If you've ever hacked or considered hacking your Android device, you're probably familiar with CyanogenMod. Although there are plenty of custom Android ROMs out there, CyanogenMod is one of the most well-known. In fact, CyanogenMod just passed 1 million active users. CyanogenMod was created by Steve “Cyanogen” Kondik. Given the success of CyanogenMod, it should be no surprise that the project is continuing to evolve and grow into new areas. Koushik Dutta, one of the CyanogenMod team members, would like to see an App Store for root apps and apps that are "getting shut down for...Read more...

The Apple TV may be just a hobby for Apple, and sure enough, it's a major hobby for hackers as well. Over the new year, those very hackers were able to get iOS apps to run in full-screen mode on the Apple TV. Steven Troughton-Smith is no stranger to this realm; he's best known for getting Siri to work on devices other than the iPhone 4S. And now, he's turning his attention to the Apple TV. The hack isn't available to the masses just yet, but the proof is in the video. Image Source: Steve Troughton-Smith Troughten-Smith told CNET: "Nick had written this amazing window manager for the...Read more...